The German National Intelligence Service has classified the extreme right alternative to Germany, which some surveys show how the most popular in the country, as an extremist party, announced the German authorities on Friday.
The decision intensifies a dilemma for Germany on what to do with the party, known as AFD, whose leaders trivialized the holocaust, revived foreign Nazi and denigrated slogans, expanding as they expand their political base.
The designation is certain that it inflames a long -standing debate that German legislators must move the party entirely. Such a step could launch Germany in a political crisis, without necessarily resolving how to bring 25 percentage of the electorate who supports the Afd in the mainstream political fold.
The American secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has labeled the “German border immigration policies” of Germany as an extremist, rather than the AFD, in a declaration published on X.
“Germany has just given its espionage agency new powers to supervise the opposition. It is not democracy – it is tyranny in disguise,” he said in the mail.
The problem now threatens to become a distraction for Friedrich Merz, whose position has decreased when the AfD has increased in recent weeks, even before having an oath as a chancellor, which is scheduled for Tuesday.
Although the AFD arrived according to the elections in February, with 20.8 percent of the votes, Merz and his Conservative Christian Democratic Party joined other traditional parties in commitment to avoid the Afd as too extreme to govern. Instead, Merz turned to the Social Democrats on the central left as a coalition partner, increasing the sense of contempt among Afd voters.
The Afd leaders sentenced the announcement on Friday as a politically motivated attempt to reduce their party and said they would challenge him to court. The AFD now constitutes the greatest threat to the parties of the German establishment, which have seen their decades of dominion over erroneous politics when the country's political panorama fractured.
Among other things, the AFD indicated the times of the decision, characterizing it as a separation shot from the Minister of the Interior, Nancy Faeser, a left -wing democratic social, a few days before being replaced in the new Merz government by Alexander Dobrindt, a mainstream conservative.
“This decision of the Office for the protection of the Constitution is complete absurdity in terms of substance, has nothing to do with the law and justice and is purely political in the struggle between the parts of the cartel against the Afd,” said Stephan Brandner, an Afd leader.
However, the Domestic Intelligence Agency took its determination after having thoroughly monitored the AFD for years and based its decision on the results of a 1,100 pages ratio completed by the office for the protection of the Constitution.
The office was specifically created in 1950 to monitor the internal threats to German democracy and prevent any acquisition of Parliament and the government by extremist actors. It was an attempt by the modern founders of Germany to avoid the type of breakage that took place in 1933, when the Nazis seized the control of Parliament and the government.
While the office is under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior, which is responsible for domestic security, it is designed to operate regardless of the government, to isolate it from the political pressure that the AFD claims that they were the basis of the decision.
“The AFD supports an ethnic concept of people who discriminating entire group of population and treats citizens with a migrant background as second class Germans,” said Mrs. Faeser, the interior minister leaving, in a declaration, noting that this discrimination clashes in the constitution of Germany.
Most of the tests of the designation resided in plain sight.
Alice Weidel, the most visible leader of the party, blocked himself against “girls who wear the veil” and “men who brandish well -being”, in reference to Muslims.
Alexander Gauland, who once led the party, described the holocaust as a grain of “bird poop” – used a more vulgar word – out of 1,000 years of successful German history.
Another legislator, Maximilian Krah, told an Italian newspaper interview last year that the members of the SS, the notorious Nazi paramilitary soldiers who, among other things, managed Nazi concentration camps, were not criminal in themselves.
Björn Höcke, leader of the party in the State of Turingia, was twice sentenced and fined last year for using a Nazi slogan prohibited during a campaign stop.
“The AFD is a magnet for domestic extremists and represents a threat to democracy from the inside,” said Matthias Quet, a professor of sociology who has spent years studying extreme law, in an e -mail exchange.
Party members were also implicated in a plot to overthrow the state by a group that does not recognize the legitimacy of the modern German Republic. That case is still going through the courts.
The party rarely penalized its leaders for a controversial speech, although it has ousted some members on particularly excellent infringements. Instead he showed up as a victim of traditional political and media liberal parties.
The political allies of the FD from abroad have done the same. Despite the long and public history of the extreme declarations by the Afd leaders, the party received approval during the last election campaign from Elon Musk, the billionaire councilor for President Trump.
In February, vice -president JD Vance chastised European leaders for trying to isolate the far -right parties and challenged their commitment to democracy.
Mr. Vance's speech at the Monaco security conference has stunned and made his German guests angry, attracting severe reproaches by Chancellor Olaf Scholz. German officials accused him of interfering in internal politics and not having understood the sources of Germany's rigorous limits to the extremists, given his nazi calamitic past.
Before the announcement of Friday, the domestic intelligence agency had classified the wing of the AFD young people as an extremist in 2023. Since then the party has dissolved it.
The new classification offers domestic intelligence more tools to monitor the AFD. It also opens a legal road to have the Constitutional Court forbidden to the party, a step that the Supreme Court of Germany has made only twice in the 196 -year history of the modern German Constitution, both times with the much less popular parts of the AFD.
The German Foreign Ministry responded to Rubio's declaration late on Friday, affirming on X that the “decision is the result of an in -depth and independent investigation to protect our Constitution and the rule of law”.
“We learned from our history that right -wing extremism must be stopped,” wrote the ministry in his post.